She had the affection and care of two mother-figures, her mother, Lola Gómez de León and her aunt, Tata, Magdalena explains, recalling her early life.
[2] She initially decided on studying economics until she was recruited by Orlando Fals Borda and Camilo Torres Restrepo, a pioneer of Liberation theology and co-founder of the first sociology faculty in Latin America.
The group of students included of four women and twelve or thirteen men and were led by Fals, Torres, and Andrew Pierce; Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda joined later.
León graduated in 1963 and was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study at the University of Washington, where she received a masters degree.
Key books and their authors were beginning to circulate in bookstores, such as Betty Friedan and her The Feminine Mystique although, as León later explained, at that time, she had no direct contact with liberal feminism or the radical feminism that emerged later in the U.S.[1] It was upon her return to Colombia again and looking for work, when León was confronted with the desire to understand what was happening to the women of her country.
[1] From 1981 to 1986, she developed the "Acciones para transformar las condiciones socio-laborales del servicio doméstico en Colombia" (English: Actions project to transform the socio-labor conditions of domestic service in Colombia), a project that sought not only to understand the phenomenon as such, but also to "transform the labor relations of domestic service".
The work had an influence on labor legislation and made it possible to achieve recognition of the rights of female workers, including the law that gave them access to social security.
This research generated processes of individual and collective reflection between the employees and the employers, and promoted the organization of the women's union as domestic workers and citizens.
[6][7] In 1986, León published the study, La mujer y la política agraria en América Latina (English: Women and agrarian policy in Latin America) in which she makes the work of rural women visible, recognizes them as agricultural producers, and characterizes the peasant economy in Latin America as a family farming system, a thesis contrary to that of Boserup who interpreted it as a masculine agricultural system.
The result crystallized in the book, Género, propiedad y empoderamiento: tierra, Estado y mercado en América Latina (English: Gender, property and empowerment: land, State and market in Latin America) (2000), a comparative study that covers twelve countries in which the authors demonstrate that gender inequality in land ownership in Latin America Latina is rooted in family, community, state, and market relations.